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|
| Sir J. Bowring's luckless aspirations after tom-toms and
| cock-feathers have committed an amount of havoc, as
| well in England as in China, which, if notoriety be his
| aim, will give him more of it than could be gained by the
| most gorgeous procession along the streets of the
| recalcitrant Cantonese. Our constitutional saturnalia have
| begun, and till they are closed, everything else must be
| suspended. All social or legal reform, every
| philanthropic enterprise, the agitation of every important
| question, must be hung up till the nation has disposed of
| the merits of Dr. Bowring. He has had many victims
| besides Yeh and the savage barbarians whom we are
| cannonading into gentleness and love. At least half a
| million ~~ probably a great deal more ~~ will be spent
| within the next three months in inducing Englishmen to
| exercise the franchise of which they are so
|
| proud. Many a budding patriot will shrink again into the
| slender proportions of a village Hampden. We shall lose
| several well-known faces, and, we hope, several
| well-execrated bores. And among other losses, we trust
| we shall bear it with fitting resignation if we should be
| compelled to part with some of those agricultural divines
| who are so fond of turning their ploughshares into swords,
| and whose martial Protestantism has lately so much
| edified the godly. Doubtless they will carry their
| principles into private life. An evangelical coachman
| who gets drunk and runs down other people's carriages,
| and a T. P. (truly pious) gamekeeper who poaches their
| neighbour's pheasants, will be as dear to their enlightened
| hearts as a Premier who varnishes over an impotent
| domestic policy by Protestant bishops at home and
| profligate bloodshed abroad.
| Everywhere one may see the symptoms of approaching
| dissolution. The House is indeed the very picture of
| desolate wretchedness.

"Death is upon its closing
| eye."

All its old cheerfulness and vivacity is gone.
| The hearty Opposition shout, renowned throughout the
| House, is dumb. The crowd of Ministerialists who used
| to throng the shadowy corner behind the Speaker's chair,
| and sleep and cheer, and cheer and sleep by turns, have
| disappeared. You will listen in vain for the merry hum of
| conversation with which the Radical benches were wont
| to beguile the weary periods of Lewis or of Wood.
| Heavy perfunctory debates, with spasmodic efforts at
| electioneering interspersed, have succeeded; but they are
| delivered to scattered rows of long gloomy faces. There
| are no brothers Phillimore now, by rival cheers, to
| encourage a floundering debater. Their well-known
| voices are still ~~ for the hand of Hayter is upon them,
| and they are doomed. Lord John Russell still sits
| , as our Cannon-ball wit, Sir J. Tyrell, expressed it,
| bravely maintaining his post in spite of the tempestuous
| tea-pots of the City. His thin anxious face is stamped
| with the resolve which his whole life has exemplified,
| that, if he cannot win, he will at least wound in falling.
| And the giant veteran, Sir James, still sits on to the last;
| but his face no longer wears that benignant, almost
| paternal, smile with which it was his wont to listen to the
| bitter insinuations flung at him by his former colleagues.
|
| gathers on his beaming countenance as he leans his chin
| upon his stick. He is wearily bethinking himself that the
| time is drawing near when he must perform another stage
| of that ceaseless pilgrimage of which Carlisle seems to be
| both the starting-place and the goal. All is sad and
| spiritless. The very Speaker has relaxed the reins which
| he soon will cease to hold; and the elegant form of Sir
| Charles Napier may be seen reclining in horizontal
| gracefulness, and seeking ~~ shade of Manners-Sutton!
| ~~ in the benches of the House of Commons a substitute
| for his hammock. Below the bar, there is a flux and
| efflux of listless Peers. Their own legislative energy has
| been struck with paralysis by the late events ~~ assuredly
| by no fault of their own, for they did their best, or worst,
| to prevent it. So they saunter in to see if there is any
| more excitement to be got out of the Commons; and
| when they find that the proceedings are, if possible, even
| duller than their own, they saunter out again. The only
| persons who show signs of real animation are the Whips.
| They are not the stormy petrels of the political horizon ~~
| the fiercer the tempest, the more merrily they fly hither
| and thither. Now is their hour. Mr. Hayter is for the
| moment a more important man than the Premier. All
| those whom he has wheedled in vain during four long
| years will now feel the power of his arm. His incessant
| hurry, his weighted brow and compressed lips, betray that
| he has a full consciousness of his position. He slips in
| and out of the House with the activity of an armadillo ~~
| now gliding on to the Treasury bench, and whispering in
| a leader's ear ~~ now gently carrying off under his arm
| some timid follower, who has broken his pledges and
| dreads the hustings, and cheering him with flattering tales
| of the skill of Coppock and the charms of place. And, as
| he passes, you may see the Opposition members making
| way for him with a kind of sullen awe; for they have
| heard that he has sworn to run a candidate in every field
| in the United Kingdom, and his well-known success in a
| hundred trying emergencies has inspired men with a
| vague notion of his omnipotence.
| One thing amid all these hopes, and fears, and interests,
| most men seem to have agreed to look upon with
| indifference; and that one thing is legislation. It is well to
| dwell on, and to remember these scenes, for they teach us
| what the result of annual Parliaments would be. What is
| now an exceptional degradation would then be the
| constant condition of the House of Commons. All
| speeches would be electioneering manifestoes ~~ all
| votes would be addressed to Bunkum ~~ all legislation
| that was not recommended by some claptrap cry would
| be passed over with contempt. The transient orgy of
| misrule in which whips govern and statesmen cringe,
| would become the permanent order of Parliamentary
| subordination.